Steve Lacy
When he first appeared in this magazine six years ago, Steve Lacy was 19 and still living at home with his mother in Compton
He spent his time making music in his bedroom, driving around in a Kia listening to Stereolab CDs and going on tour as the guitarist for ungoogleable band The Internet. Since then he’s become a superstar: his chart-topping song ‘Bad Habit’ streamed billions of times, a Grammy award-winning album, plus a handsome appearance as the face of Saint Laurent in 2023. He’s still only 26.
His is the kind of fame that sells out stadiums and sees people obsess over the details of his life, like his friendships with rapper Kendrick Lamar and singer Fousheé or what he gets up to with his dog, Eve. Despite being so popular, Steve is more interested in mastering the art of being a ridiculously talented musician who can sing beautifully, write his own music, play multiple instruments, command a stage and fuse a million references together into something thrillingly original. Right now he’s busy working on a new album, which is hundreds of drafts deep and slowly being perfected. As always, he’s quite happy to keep things weird.
From Fantastic Man n° 39 — 2024
Text by DURGA CHEW-BOSE
Photography by DAVEY ADÉSIDA
Styling by PAU AVIA
His week looks something like this. In the mornings, Steve Lacy wakes up at eight, closer to nine. He drinks coffee and lets out his dog, Eve, an American bully. Maybe he calls Tiffany, a family friend and mentor whom he describes as his fairy godmother. Maybe he makes a playlist, what Steve calls one of his love languages. Maybe he puts together an outfit – an elaborate process, he admits. “I like to make sure it looks good at all angles. I’ve been like this since high school. It would take me a while, and my mom and sisters were, like, ‘You’re literally just going to Target!’”
Maybe he lounges in his Verner Panton, the blobby living tower from his ‘Apollo XXI’ album cover, only now the furniture sculpture is pink instead of orange. Steve loves upholstery, loves to decorate (“It’s the Taurus moon in me”). His home is his “getaway” and he’s careful to protect it, admitting he would never want to live with anyone. When he’s dating, “the sleepover is nice,” he says, “but staying with me consecutive days is craziness.” The awkward next-morning suggestion of goodbye? Steve is still sorting out how to do that. “I kind of don’t. I just wait until they notice the energy is bad, and then they leave.” He’s not confrontational, though he’s working on it. “I’m growing up. I’m only 26.”
Maybe after his date leaves, Steve spends time in his backyard, where he’s recently installed a sauna. Or maybe he watches some comedy (Luenell or Deon Cole, but not Richard Pryor. “That’s too old.”) Or maybe he goes for a drive. Maybe he gets tacos. Who does he invite? Who does he text? “I’m a bad texter. I read it and respond in my head.” Is Steve more likely to make plans or cancel them? “I’m about windows of time,” he says. “I’m, like, ‘Catch me. We’re doing this right now. Boom.’”
If no one is available, Steve is content to stay home, where after many years, he’s built his own studio. It’s a familiar environment, seeing as he first started this way, ten years ago in his Compton bedroom, playing guitar with The Internet and producing music from his single bed – a teenager with a Grammy nomination and a gift for seductive bass lines, singing with a talky vocal range that never sacrifices intimacy. Since then, Steve has released one EP and two albums, including the critically praised ‘Gemini Rights’, his 2022 studio album that featured the plaintive and psychedelic, drowsy pop ballad, ‘Bad Habit’, acclaimed for both its enduring simplicity (no autotune, for example) and its mass appeal (beloved on TikTok, 140 million views on YouTube, 1 billion Spotify streams). With ‘Bad Habit’, something clicked. Steve broke through. The song topped every chart. The plainspoken appeal of his songwriting (I bite my tongue, it’s a bad habit / Kinda mad that I didn’t take a stab at it) was leisurely and friendly – companionable. Steve’s soulful, lo-fi singularity and vanguard creative spirit was suddenly pop. More so, it seemed to agree with his pursuit of art, which, with any luck, will remain timeless. “I spend a lot of time thinking about how things patinate. I want to make things that age well.”
What does timeless mean to you?
“Drum choices. Sound selection. Subject matter. And being a little bit vague.”
How do you know when you have it?
[long pause]
“I spend a lot of time listening to make sure I still like it. That’s when I know I have something. Sometimes I need to forget about it and come back to it, and it’s the coming back to it that lets me know it’s something. It’s easy to make things that are nice. I have so many nice drafts. But I feel like I’m searching for a specific thing that’s nice but different, yet familiar.”
What does “soulful” mean to you?
“It invites Black people to come and listen. That’s the only way I can describe it. It’s that thing.”
Do you remember the first time you created what you feel is your own sound?
“I didn’t realise it was a sound until people started copying it. [laughs] Then I was, like, ‘Oh, shit. I made a genre.’”
***
The last time Steve appeared in this magazine, he was still living at home in Compton with his mother, Valerie. It was 2018, only a year after the release of his demo, and yet, he was well into his career, receiving praise from artists like Nile Rodgers, who called Steve a musical pioneer – “innovation personified” – even inviting him to lecture on the intersection of technology and music at the 2017 TEDxTeen Conference held in New York. As the writer of the piece, Alex Frank, noted back then, Steve’s whole being (his U-turn driving, his philosophical tangents, his Winnie the Pooh fleece blanket) seemed to volley between goofy charisma and old-soul poise – personalities that could very well specify Steve’s evanescent sound. The confessional tone of his music is never self-serious; it’s remained emo-proof, marvellous in its evasion of genre or conspicuous reference.
We meet in a spot Steve would rather we not disclose. “I don’t like hip places,” he says. And while this spot, near Echo Park in Los Angeles, seems hip with its coconut seeded granola, matcha americanos and vegan burritos, what Steve means, in this case, is he likes places where he can remain incognito, where he can order and eat in peace. It’s a hot day and we’re sitting outside. Steve is wearing a breezy, tropical-themed shirt with an all-over palm-tree print and blue jeans that fall effortlessly over a pair of black leather boots. Everything fits as if it has been tailored not just to his body, but to how Steve sits (slightly hunched over with his legs crossed). He looks beautiful. He orders pancakes, a burrito and an Arnold Palmer. We talk for more than two hours, enjoying quiet breaks where Steve shows me things on his phone, like screen grabs of runway looks from The Row, and plays me a potential track from his next album. (It’s good, of course. It’s instantaneous. It made me smile.)
Even with a new studio just steps away from his bedroom, Steve won’t begin working, free writing or sketching songs until evening. “Whenever I try to make music in the daytime, I’m, like, scratching my head, ‘What am I doing here? The sun is out.’” Maybe Steve will wait until five. That’s when he’s “on fire, just killing it, the music is flowing. I can sometimes go five to five.” On Thursday nights he checks out new music releases. On Fridays, he talks to someone who’s not a therapist but rather what he calls an “energy-therapy hybrid.” Every second Sunday, he hosts his family for dinner. “I’m really close to my family. My friends who have family far away, I always invite them to hang with my family. We take them in.” Does Steve cook? “I don’t, but I know I’d be good at it if I did.”
He enjoys playing with his nieces and nephews. “I’m just a big kid.” For fun, Uncle Steve might gift them ghoulish Halloween masks that terrify Eve the dog. The kids wear the masks while praying at the table and eating supper. The kids love the Verner Panton, naturally. Like Steve, they love blobby furniture.
“As a kid I made forts a lot.”
You have fort energy.
“Yeah, I give fort. I love fort.”
Is designing furniture of any interest to you?
“I don’t see myself making things for the sake of it, to make a business out of it. With music, I still know how to channel my 16 or 17-year-old self who made stuff in his room because he loved it. I also don’t want to do something that’s too Steve Lacy, that’s too expected. Then I know I need to go weirder.”
Steve’s Thursday ritual of discovering new music is one way he distils his place in the larger galaxy of genres and musicians. He seems both sceptical and hopeful, and like any artist who’s in the wild, deep-thinking, creative midst of crafting their next work, Steve appears elsewhere and dreamy. He looks away, focusing his attention on some middle distance. “There’s so much out there, like, D’Angelo exists already. He made something perfect. Why do I need to make music?”
Have you found an answer?
“I guess I still feel like there still is stuff that hasn’t been done. And I feel like I can make those things. Or it’s probably less that and just…I touch my computer and my instruments, and I think, ‘They haven’t done it like…this…yet.’ There are a lot of songs that are great, but there are a lot of topics that haven’t been covered.”
Like what?
“There’s always so many angles of human connection. There’s music I love, but it’s from back in the ’60s or even 2005. We all look differently at people from back then.”
He uses music, not life, to elaborate on this notion of difference. His craft, it seems, is dialectical, a metaphor or tool for explaining not just his work, but his life, his process, how he moves through the world. “There’s a difference between referencing and ripping off.
To reference things, it has to enter your veins. It’s a full-body thing. When I reference, it’s super subconscious.” He tells a story about his song ‘Dark Red’, the third track on ‘Steve Lacy’s Demo’ (2017). It’s an ominous tonic of a song, distinctive in its soulful austerity.
It builds and unravels as Steve scuffles with himself, wondering if his then girlfriend is leaving him: What if she’s fine? / It’s my mind that’s wrong / And I just let bad thoughts / Linger for far too long. “I wrote the fuck out of [‘Dark Red’] and then it came out, and it was doing its thing.” This was around the same time Lacy was a fan of Brooklyn indie rock band Dirty Projectors. “I was listening to the song, ‘The Bride’, from their album ‘Bitte Orca’, and I heard a part, and I was, like, ‘Oh shit, I took that.’ I didn’t even know. I guess the song just entered my stream.”
This stream Steve speaks of – a continuous current of ideas and imagination, free and strange – extends to other, more recent forms of artistry, not necessarily hobbies, but pursuits and whims that he describes, for now, as one-off and personal. It’s worth mentioning that Steve loves to touch. He’s absorbed by tactility. He survives small talk, living alongside it perhaps, by always carrying a cube-shaped fidget toy. (They are part of his tour rider).
One such “thing” that has entered his stream is a friendship with fine-jewellery designer Irene Neuwirth, who is designing a weed-leaf pendant with Steve, hand-carved in green tourmaline. Anyone familiar with Neuwirth’s work would find the pairing at first incongruous, but also very charming. Neuwirth’s designs have a cult-like, Southern California following, ocean-inspired with superbloom motifs and conch-pearl gumballs. Maybe the collaboration between both artists is note-perfect in its imperfection – a reflection of Steve’s perennial need to seek out combinations that live outside the realm of logic and consciousness, but aren’t gimmick or stunt, either. If it fits, it fits, but only because it doesn’t exactly fit. Steve looks down at his lap. “It’s silly,” he says, clarifying the unserious splendour and casual plainness inherent to his overall project. He points to my earrings and identifies their karat: “Twenty-four, that’s hard to find.” He looks at my red shoes, which leads us down a Dries Van Noten tangent.
“I like Dries. Did you like his last show?”
Yes. It’s sad but it’s also aspirational to walk away. To know when it’s time to think about what’s next, on your own terms.
“100%.”
It’s so classy and romantic.
“I’m happy that you said that, because it reminds me: that’s why I’m doing this story, to announce my departure from music.”
He’s joking of course. He’s often joking. “Ever since I was a child, I was always trolling. On my last tour I got a lot of press for how I was an asshole to my fans, but I was just trolling. That’s my swag.” That friction is his playground. He applies it to his music. It’s how he keeps things silly, a word he uses often. “I’ll make a soul track and approach it as if D’Angelo joined a rock band, but I’ll also make it rap and blues. It’s always a fluid mix.” He’s always trying to find the fun in it. “I like getting into little crevices where things don’t make that much sense.”
Unlike many artists of his generation who seem drawn to multi-hyphenate creative roles, Steve prefers to keep things simple and focused, though he did collaborate with Bose on two pairs of headphones earlier this year. One wonders if, given his preternatural sense of style, Steve would ever partner with a brand. He shakes his head. “It’s cheesy to do that, as a musician. It’s been killed already for me. If I ever did, you wouldn’t know. If I were to, it would be for friends, family, myself. It’s better if it’s just out of love. I DJ privately, for free, for fun. It’s nice to do things that you don’t monetise.” He says all that, and then quickly cites Solange as an inspiration, whose recent glassware he’s started collecting. One wonders if — as he said — there’s already some secret Steve Lacy designs out there in the world, hiding in plain sight. He is, after all, a supreme collaborator, remarkably attune with other artists’ tone and whatever gives them lustre. He’s worked with everyone from Thundercat to Vampire Weekend, Tyler, the Creator, Solange (“The only artist who takes advantage of my bass playing”), and perhaps his favourite lyricist on an intuitive level, Fousheé, a rising singer-songwriter.
His criteria for finding musical kinship, someone to conspire with on a song or simply jam with, is typically Steve in its ambiguous selectivity. “It could be a weird note. I’m moved by what’s weird. It’s almost like I hear them, and I think, ‘I need to call this person.’” As he continues to work towards his next album, having already written something close to 300 sketches, he considers who he might want to feature: “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want a Kendrick verse.” Steve recently made a cameo in Lamar’s ‘Not Like Us’ video and shortly before that, at his Inglewood Pop Out, a one-off concert at the Kia Forum arena, which marked Lamar’s first major public performance since his gloriously lionised feud with Drake. Everyone from Dr. Dre to Roddy Ricch, YG, Dom Kennedy and Ty Dolla Sign were featured during the event. Steve admits he felt out of place at first. “I was the only fairy-type person in this room full of rap, hard rap music. I feel like a fairy. I don’t feel hard. I don’t feel tough. We were at the run-through, and I was, like, ‘How am I here?’ But I was so honoured. Compton has this rep of being hard. I thought I would never be in the conversation. It was cool.”
Steve says he grew up “inside the house,” cultivating his imagination in the company of his sisters, who exposed him to an older, more feminine sensibility. He would borrow their iPods and listen to India Arie. “I’m a kid who was raised in the hood, whose mother wouldn’t let him do hoodrat shit like be outside.” Ultimately, he’s appreciative. “A lot of things I wish I had done, that my mom kept me from, I’m grateful for. I’m grateful for growing up in Compton. I’m grateful for the limitations that I had. I’m grateful for the things I couldn’t get.”
How has your relationship with your mom changed over the years?
“Still the same. But I’m an adult now and I’m forming my own thoughts and beliefs and wanting certain things to be understood by her. And moms are hard in that way. I’m her only son, so I have that bond with her. Moms and their daughters are different. I feel for [my sisters].”
Are you favoured?
“Naturally, I think so. I’m the mediator.”
Despite his recent interest in interiors and objects, or his own personal style, Steve insists he isn’t a visual person. “I don’t have a visual language. I don’t have that part of my brain. Sometimes I get in my head about it because even if I make cool videos, they’re fine, I just don’t think I’ve made a video where I’m, like, ‘Damn, that’s me.’” Steve mentions Donald Glover aka Childish Gambino’s ‘This Is America’ (2018) video directed by Hiro Murai as the last example of an iconic visual. “[Glover has] developed his visual language very well. Maybe I can have him help me? But I also don’t know how much I want to be the subject. I do this dance between wanting to be the subject and wanting to be behind the scenes. I’m very discerning about my face in photoshoots. I like to have a character. It’s bad enough my name is Steve Lacy. If I can have anything for myself, like my face or my body… I just want you to focus on exactly what is it I’m trying to say to you, rather than it’s me saying this to you. I don’t aspire to be the biggest pop star. And I don’t mind if my work isn’t really good. I had a pop moment but I’m not chasing it.”
When did you start calling yourself an artist?
“Probably the last album.”
What changed?
“I felt more sure. I had to zoom out and look at what people respect me for. That was one thing. And then there was a break-up. It gave me focus.”
How much does joy play a role in your artistry?
“It drives it. Joy and pain. When you get the right mixture, you get magic.”
Steve, who features on Glover’s new album, ‘Bando Stone & The New World’, performed with him and Fousheé in July in New York at Glover’s listening party. Fans shared videos online and the three musicians’ rapport was unpolluted by spectacle, almost impromptu and sweet. It’s unsurprising, considering Steve’s genuine connection to performing. “In this modern age, it just feels like the most truthful way to communicate without all the blah blah blah in between. I think it’s good to be there in the flesh, to say ‘Hello, I see you. How are you?’ I’m always trying to make it fresh, for me, for them. It’s not plug and play. I like performing because it’s a way to own your shit. If you can perform and if you can establish that relationship with people, you can do it for however long, whether you want to put out albums or not. Even if your albums flop, if you have a fanbase, they will show up for you regardless. I’m one of the few artists playing and singing. You get to see musicianship. There are people I meet on the street who say that they picked up an instrument because of me. I think that it’s really important to carry on, because someone did that for me. It was Jimi, and D’Angelo, and Prince.” Steve’s pre-show rituals include praying with his band, vocal warm-ups, breathing and, sometimes, a ten-minute nap. “You don’t really fall asleep. It’s more like meditation. In the tenth minute you start to fall asleep and then you wake up, and then it’s show time.”
In an email, Glover, who characterises the experience of playing with Steve as “comforting,” describes the artist’s sound as pure. “I feel like I’m 14, riding my bike alone when I listen to Steve.” When asked what he’s learnt from working with Steve, his response switches keys. “There’s a song called ‘Real Love’ on my new album that Steve did the harmonies on. Everyone who heard that song was scared of it because I think the sincerity of it made it tricky. Steve heard it and immediately said, ‘Yo! Lemme get on that.’ He was the only one that wasn’t afraid of how sweet the song was. He did harmonies in three minutes flat,” Glover says. “I was touched by how uninhibited he was, and is. So many artists are so worried about cringe, opposed to what they actually think is cool or fun.”
So. Where is the album? It doesn’t matter. Steve is in no rush. He’s writing, but he’s also, as he puts it, just living. Steve doesn’t make music in a vacuum, isolated from the world. His cosmic brew of styles, everlasting in its ease, constitutes more listening than making. More scrutiny, seeking, testing. Observation free of craze. He cites the late musical genius, Sophie, as a galvanising creative force in his life. He mentions the new alt-pop artist Cecile Believe, formerly known as Mozart’s Daughter. He talks about the music he loves while tapping his foot and air-playing a bass. His influences run through him and even though we are sitting outside in the Los Angeles heat, eating burritos and kale salad, Steve drifts elsewhere in moments, like he’s at someone else’s concert, happy to be alone in a mob. He doesn’t watch shows from backstage, even when offered. He loves to be in a crowd. He’s spent this in-between time – that beautiful period before the storm, before the promotion – understanding where his music can meet his audience and friends, ever-sensitive to their universe. “I’m talking to people. Seeing how we all feel. What’s the human emotion? What’s the shared emotions?”
And? Tell us.
“There’s a bit of confusion. This disorientation that’s common for everyone.”
Describe it.
“It’s like we’ve all stood up too fast.”
Suddenly, Steve proposes a visual reference. “‘Being John Malkovich’, that’s the vibe. If I can give you any hints for how I want to write, it’s like that movie. I don’t want to make too much sense. I’m happy with the way things are coming, but it’s been hard. It’s been whooping my ass. It feels like a big secret.” With ‘Gemini Rights’, he began moving towards a persona, annexing the same instincts he has for performance during photo shoots, but this time, with his music. He describes using something as small as a pair of sunglasses as his muse. While the framework for his next album is still a work in progress, the pursuit of a persona will be a focal point. Steve makes clear his disinterest in art that reflects who he is and who he is becoming. The music will belong to the artist, not necessarily formerly known as Steve Lacy, but in that spirit.
As we talk about the future (children, yes; marriage, no), what’s obvious is the personal pressure Steve imposes on himself to produce an album that will live in the future, even predict the future. He’s digging deep. He’s in search of the fundamentals, something closer to zero, to no-sound, to no-image; the prospect of paring down. Steve describes a recent date with a guy. “We were talking about karaoke songs and he mentioned, ‘Sex and Candy’ by Marcy Playground. I’d never heard it. And I was, like, ‘Whoa, I love that song.’” It cracked something open in Steve, perhaps because the song – which was released in 1997, a year before Steve was born – shares the artist’s attraction to molten sounds and hypnotic lyrics that veer, two tenets of his next album, he says. “I’m trying to get out of the habit of writing a song. There are these moments or strides that you hit creatively, where you’re, like, ‘I’ve found it, I got it.’ Portals open and we’ve got to go in and get it all done. And then it stops, and I realise it wasn’t a direction, that it was purely a technique. We’re just collecting techniques, and I’m still waiting on a direction. I’m patient. I’m very confident that the songs I’m developing, no one else is going to make. It fills me with calm.”
One wonders if there’s an element of destiny essential to Steve’s practice. He thinks so. He describes a conversation he had with Tiffany, his fairy godmother, last New Year’s Eve (Steve’s favourite holiday because “there’s no story time around it. It’s literally a new year. You just turn up.”) Every year, Steve throws a party, and every year, Tiffany arrives early so the two of them can check in. This past year, Tiffany asked Steve if he’d dreamt this life, if what he was doing was part of some vision. “I told her, I just wanted to play guitar. All of this is just tree branches of that. I’ve always just wanted to play guitar. That’s been my only thought, my only goal. To play.”
Photographic assistance by Fred Mitchell and Luis Ramirez. Stying assistance by Karen Gonzales, Joanne Lee, Tommaso Palamin and Gina Norwitz. Grooming by Alexa Hernandez at The Wall Group. Set design by Jeremy Reimnitz. Production by Palm Productions. Special thanks to Milk Studios.